I'm just picturing a news conference in my head... a man in a white lab coat, Oakley shades, and a big gold chain that says "Biochemists Do It Mitochondrially" struts out into the stage. He pulls out a microphone and shouts, "WHAT UPPPP, MEDIA BITCHES! YO WE MADE THAT BITCH ASS NIGGA CANCER OUR BITCH!"

Then, Snoop Dogg comes out and talks about the growing biomedical field in Compton./p

If somebody said: "SirWired, we can cure your otherwise-hopeless terminal cancer, but at the cost of being infected with HIV", I'd take the HIV any day of the week. Treatments for advanced cancer are often considered breakthroughs if they extend life by a few months. HIV, on the other hand, is getting very close to being a chronic long-term condition not much more serious than Type-I diabetes. (As in, if you have the treatments available and use them, you'll live a pretty normal, albeit likely shorter, life.)

My thoughts exactly. Whenever I read about this story I think both of "I am Legend" and "Resident Evil" movies. Even if they are fantasy I think the "do not mess with viruses" message still holds true.

(P.S. I did check and the plural of virus is viruses not viri nor virii).

The C*O of the first company to put a cancer cure on the market will be 10's, if not 100's of millions of dollars.Unless you propose the people at the top are so kind they would be happy to let the next CEO, or some other company make the money.

Anyone that has any kind of issue with this, please pack your things and get out of the civilised world. You don't deserve to live past 30 in a heated home with running water, electrical appliances and the ability to communicate with someone more than 20 feet away.

Hasn't yet been show statistically effective to treat cancer in humansHasn't yet been shown safe in humansRequires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained.

While I agree that it's potentially dangerous I think that it's very promising. The fact that many people are condemned to certain and painful death without this kind of treatment makes pursuing this treatment critically important. Human trials on volunteers with no hope otherwise makes sense in this case.

1. Correct.2. Correct, though from the only tests I heard of in the past none damaged the patient in an unexpected way.3. Yes but that will take time and I believe even if there is a 100% chance of that happening, your future will still look brighter with the treatment rather with small cell lung cancer.

2. Correct, though from the only tests I heard of in the past none damaged the patient in an unexpected way.

Not unexpected, but at least one of the patients ended up in the ICU for a couple weeks as his body effectively fought off the most massive infection (from the immune system's point of view) a human has ever seen. You can't have 10 lbs of cancerous mass dissolve off your body in a week without there being some pretty serious repercussions to the rest of your body.

"Requires use of a potentially unsafe HIV variant that could mutate back to a virulent strain. Extreme care would be required to ensure that the modified virus can be contained."

Given that virulent cancer is far more dangerous than even the nastiest strains of HIV, the HIV would be pretty much always preferable. As long as they start with a strain that is easily controlled via existing drugs, I'd say we'll be fine. Heck, maybe they can dig some out of the vault that even AZT can control long-term.

Being afraid of this treatment because it starts with HIV makes little sense. Yes, more precautions need to be taken than working with, say, E.Coli, but frankly a syringe full of HIV isn't any more dangerous than some of the drugs we use as cancer treatments. (Some chemo formulations are downright scary...)

Nobody's saying you should go out and get HIV if you happen to be diagnosed with Cancer. Science is all about being careful, taking detailed notes, doing tests, tests and more tests, etc. Sure, mistakes happen but that's why it's important to do as much research as possible into as much as we can.I only have issues with those who condemn something simply because they either don't understand it or are afraid of what it MIGHT do. Computers might one day enslave us, but does that mean we should stop using them

You do know that they are not actually infecting people with HIV, right? Instead, they're extracting T-cells from a human, then reprogramming them with a modified strain of HIV, letting them replicate, and then inserting the T-cells back into the body.

Granted, there are different problems for each type of vector that is used for modifying cells...but the whole HIV thing is pretty much overblown, from what I have read.

William Coley, the father of immunology, cured fully metastasized cancers in the early 1900s. Look it up - Dr. William Bradford Coley. We had a cancer cure, and this article is about a similar potential cure. Coley mixed up highly individualized brews of dangerous disease organisms and shot them into cancer tumors, and trained the patient's immune system to recognize cancer cells as something to be destroyed. You want to know why we outlawed Coley's system and are just now rediscovering it?

I like how vocal you are, but completely bereft of an actual point except being anti-nuke.

You want to know why we outlawed Coley's system and are just now rediscovering it?

Outlawed? I don't see that in anything you've cited. If you mean, rather, that it isn't FDA approved, I think you need to blame Coley himself.

Although Coley claimed successful treatment of hundreds of patients, the absence of proven benefit or reproducibility

A lack of reproducibility is FATAL to a scientific claim and any sort of study. You might as well claim you saw a unicorn in the forest.

Coley's studies were not well controlled and factors such as length of treatment and fever level were not adequately documented. Many of his patients had also received radiation and sometimes surgery.

Unless you're going to now claim the article has been surreptitiously changed by "nuke shills" to discredit him. Chances are he was on to something, but failed to appropriately document it in a way that was useful. Then, unsurprisingly, an effective solution came along and overshadowed his work.

But you didn't post this to highlight his work. You came to scream OOGA BOOGA NUKULAR.

No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old. However, note that these people are idiots and their religion has nothing to do with it. There are just as big of idiots that are non-religious or belong to some other religion, like Scientology or Heaven's Gate.

In my church, for example, I was told that the universe is roughly 13 billion years old, the earth is about 4.5 billi

No. I believe the Christians you want to kick out make up about 0.0001%. That would be about the percentage that rejects science and believes the earth is roughly 6000 years old.

While I agree with your larger point that treating all Christians identically is silly, I'm afraid you're off by several orders of magnitude here. Evolution has never been accepted by a majority of Americans at any point in our history. Here's some more recent data:

There are some inconsistencies in the answers. People are more supportive of evolution and related ideas when asked about it in isolation. But if you give a choice between humans evolving naturally vs. bein

Contrary to what protestants in general, and American ones in particular, want to believe, this isn't usually enough by any means. You see, any major literary author or work, such as Shakespeare, requires a ton of research to be properly understood, so much so you have entire academic departments dedicated to properly analyzing them. Sure, you can just take a "complete works of [author name]", read it once cover to cover, and think you understood it, but it's almost certain you didn't. Now, given major religious texts are way more complicated than "simple" literary works, the complexity expands geometrically. This is the reason why older branches of those religions usually recommend you don't directly read said texts without at least some previous preparation. It's better to first read some introductory ones to get an overall idea on the techniques used to approached the major work as well as the proper contexts, and only then dwell into it.

Please note this way to deal with such works is valid independently of whether you actually believe or not on its attached religion. Academic comparative religious studies are usually as much atheistic as everything else in academy nowadays, and yet they follow proper study patterns when dealing with such works. This is so because otherwise the results at which you'll arrive will be quite random to say the least, and overly colored by your own cultural background, always a poor way to go about analyzing anything located outside it.

By the way, please also note, for whatever it's worth, that I'm not a Christian, so this isn't preaching.

Then you have an incredible problem with reading comprehension and material retention.

And BTW, Mr Dawkinsfollower, last Sunday MY preacher spoke of the work our church is doing in Kenya. "I saw a lot of Catholics, and Methodists, and Baptists, and even Muslims, but I didn't see s single athiest, agnostic, or secular humanist."

There's a sig somewhere around her that says "Satan's greatest triumph was convincing the world he doesn't exist." Good sig.

Woah, dude, you have to put down the... whatever it is. Angry juice? (Whiskey?)

Sure, some religious people use their religion as an excuse to be assholes to each other. That's because some people are assholes, and some are sanctimonious assholes. The vast majority of religious people use their religion as a justification to make the world a better place. I believe, like most religious people, in love, forgivness, and in making the world a better place than we found it. The difference is that I'm a Hum

You know, your anti-religion trolls would go a lot farther on a different messageboard.

Do you require men who rape women to marry them and support them?

You, sir, are an idiot and the wost sort of troll. What the fuck is wrong with you God damned people, anyway? Nobody likes a flaming evamgelist, and your evangelical antitheism is worse than the Jehova's Witnesses. All I have to do to avoid them is not answer the door, you God damned fucktards are all over the internet.

First point: doctors are not scientists. Not remotely. Some doctors happen to be scientists. But this is a separate career, and they frequently are unprepared for it. This is the subject of a separate debate.

Second point: this is of course unrelated to the fact that scientists are mostly atheists. Even in the US. It is irrelevant that there are theists doctors and theists scientists: there is variation in any population. It just happens that when you say that, you obscure the greater truth that overwhelming odds are they don't believe in gods. source: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.pdf [stephenjaygould.org]

I am not completely sure what it is you are trying to say. To clarify my point: medicine is not a science.

Sciences are constructed around the formulation of theories, themselves bases for models and predictions. Doctors do pattern-matching and deal with human interactions. It is a useful and important job, but not science. So-called "scientific medicine" really is just large scale application of statistics, which is a huge progress compared to listening to voices in your head, but does nothing to advance sy

All of the practise of medicine is not science. The topic itself has some scientific roots, but ironically, "scientific medicine" is really not a science. Compiling correlations does not a science make;)

This is my personal, unauthorised opinion. I am not a biologist, though I know a lot of them and even occasionally collaborated. Biology is transforming itself into an exact science: molecular simulation, protein folding, DNA sequencing and heavier use of mathematical models are fundamentally changing how science is practised in this field.

So memorising stuff will go away like it went away in physics. Incidentally, though, if your biology classes were only about memorising stuff, you had pretty bad courses

Christian bashing, oh look, how new and novel. What a fun way to comment on something, yay.

First off, a huge number of scientists are Christians, nothing precludes science as a profession for Christians, and Christians regularly enjoy the fruit of science and engineering without a second thought. No one would have an issue with this in the Christian world except the few thousands of nut jobs who, by the way, are reflected in every sector of society, who won't take medicine of any kind.

FTFY. Corrected statement now includes fanatics of Islamic and Scientology faiths.

Unfortunately the correction does not include all the word worshipers of any faith. But closet fundamentalists of any stripe are generally tolerable, so long as they keep their self-imposed limitations on where the mind should be allowed to wander to themselves.

Define "Good Christian" - is that the self-proclaimed or those that other proclaim to be "Good"?

No, you do it.

One of my teachers in school (a Biology teacher at that) in the US when I first moved over here wrote on a review that I am a "Good Christian Boy" - does that mean I need to be kicked out too?

/ Disclaimer- I've never been a Christian of any kind and was partially amused by the comment. (part of me was peeved that it was assumed that I was "Christian" because I was "Good".

Obviously not. But the biology teacher should be put to death immediately.

You just go on the no "fly to heaven" list. That is until you define what a "Good" Christian is. Then you will be forced to join the atheist youth, we'll get you a sexy brown uniform with an atheist symbol on the shoulder and a taser. You can set up roadblocks and arrest people with Jesus fish on their cars.

You can do whatever you want to them. We'll set up prisons, like the excellent ones they have for immigr

Hopefully it doesn't make the various worldwide retirement systems go bankrupt (though some will anyway because citizens allow governments to erect Ponzi schemes).

Medical evolution without making politicians and money brokers look stupid is infeasible. So yes, that will happen. But look at the bright side. Maybe political and macro economic interests won't allow such a treatment to be legalized:-)

Cardiopulmonary will still top the list (including your pneumonia), accidents will probably move from third to second (If you count strokes in the first category by including the vascular system). It's tough to decide if people surviving cancer will be taken out by the ticker or a bug in the lungs. A reasonable assumption will be an even distribution among remaining causes.

The interesting part of the pneumonia equation is that a great deal of any internal organ failure (other than a suddon stoppage of blood to the heart or lungs) often results in lung failure via pneumonia, as the other organ conditions cause lung problems, some of which you note above.

This "pneumonia clue" is why doctors worldwide almost universally pick up the stethoscope to hear the lung sounds and heart sounds as an easy clue to internal organ problems.

Honestly, if the treatment works, and we can commercialize it at ANY (finite) cost, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry. In 1980, there was no amount of money that could sequence the human genome in a year, and in 1995 there was no amount of money that could buy the technology in a modern cell phone. If a broad spectrum, effective cancer treatment can be shown to exist, the price -will- fall.

Sure, the human lifespan is limited. But cancer doesn't always wait until you've reached advanced years to strike. Cure a five year old of lymphoma and you could reasonably have added 75 years to that person's life.

So... knowingly screwing future generations to buy votes in the current round of elections(and perhaps the next few rounds as well) is not fraud?I am not sure either way on the technicalities, but it sure sounds close enough for that to be a useful label.I rather expect that if a private company tried to run a retirement system the way social security is run, that that company would probably be shut down for fraud.

If you want to find intentional fraud, take a good hard look at the notion that the average working person has sufficient excess income AND sufficient investment expertise AND sufficient good luck to not have the economy and those investments collapse right before retirement.

Um, there has never been an 18 month period where the stock market is down. Even at the lowes

If you would look at the the math and the plan you would see that it doesn't actually 'screw' future generations. It is in no way a ponzi scheme..but man, that certainly is an emotional scare word! so it must be right!

I pretty sure 18months after '29 the market was lower . And 18 months after 40, and 18moth after 2006.If you invested in 98, ou just now getting back. so that's 14 years of.. nothing. You could have stuffed the money in you mattress and be right where you where. Or put in int a 1% interest s

Does this mean we'll be able to treat HIV with HIV modified T-cells? How about a cure for the common cold? Don't get me wrong, cure cancer first. But if we can apply almost any antigen, what's stopping us from curing basically any disease? Hint: maybe my lack of knowledge in immunology.

Cannabis is still illegal, and more illegal than meth. It has medical benefits, but very few can be studied because the funds and DEA approval are very hard to obtain. Most of this can be directly, and easily, traced to pharmaceutical companies (and the MIC), but if you think pharmaceutical companies don't drop millions in lobbying and other other actions to keep competitors out of their markets, you should just go back to contemplating your grass (which may or may not be growing and/or opressed).

It seems to me that for at least the last five years I have been reading about novel and allegedly very effective treatments for caner being developed in labs (gold nano particles, etc...) There have been a lot. Yet in the laboratory they stay. I realize what it takes to drag something through the FDA but why not unleash these future technologies on people facing certain death from cancer in the present? There are lots and lots after all. It would be the ultimate trial of these technologies. If I were f

Because there is a lot to do before it even gets to the point of 'unleashing them' Also unleashing them means no controls, so it gets hard to say which worked. And then they are often target for specific cancers and so on.You don go "Hay, this working in this one lab under these condition, lets give it to people.

You know what else kills cancer in the lag? heating it to 1000c. Maybe we should unleash that?

If these modified HIV viruses can be changed to target different types of cancer, is there any way that athey can also be modified to be killed by some substance that isn't normally deadly to the virus but also not naturally found in the body? That way once the cancer is cured, or if the virus starts to mutate, the doctors can just introduce the kill substance? Of course, IANAB(I am not a biologist, and my last bio class was AP Bio and Genetics back in high school 7 years ago), so I could just be asking a

There are a number of inducible suicide genes (for instance, the HSV1-TK gene, inducible with Acyclovir) that have been developed for this very purpose. I believe the group at U. Penn mentioned that they would like to incorporate such a feature -- but as a long-term possibility; no such "kill switch" is being used in their current treatments.

The immune system kills cancer in your body every day. Free radicals [wikipedia.org] cause cell mutations (cancer) all the time in the human body. The immune system identifies the mutated cell and destroys it. Cancer happens when the immune system either doesn't catch it in time or at all and the mutated cell begins to multiply. This sounds like any other type of immunization. [wikipedia.org] The immune system is tricked into taking action against cancer cells by attaching cells it already combats to the cancer cells.

You are close. However, this seems to be more of the immune system is tricked into taking action against cancer cells by telling it that features of cancer cells that it does not currently take note of are indicative of a foreign agent. What appears to be unique about this, as opposed to traditional methods of vaccination, is that it involves "reprogramming" the T-cells so that they are capable of attacking cells on the basis of the markers that have been chosen.

I didn't mean to imply the method they are using is simple. If it was cancer would have been wiped out years ago. I was pointing out the fact the immune system already does the job but people who develop cancer have immune systems that need a little help identifying the bad cells.

I was replying to your last sentence "The immune system is tricked into taking action against cancer cells by attaching cells it already combats to the cancer cells." My point was that instead of attaching cells the immune system already atacks to cancer cells this appears to reprogram the immune system cells so as to allow them to recognize cancer cells as "foreign", as opposed to standard immunization that "merely" cause the immune system to produce more cells which will attack a particular antigen that t

The viral vectors are based on replication-deficient HIV. They are missing some of the genes necessary for their replication. They cannot (or at least should not) be able to reproduce in the cells, so they are not giving people AIDS. One of the reasons HIV is used because it is a lentivirus, which means it can integrate into the genomes of cells that are not actively dividing.

So many posts are all worried about giving people HIV. It's good to see someone knows what they're talking about.

Not only is the HIV replication-deficient, but it's not even given to the people. They extract the T-cells, reprogram them outside of the human body with the modified HIV, then put the modified T-cells back into a human. This should allow them to double-check whether the modified T-cells are safe before inserting them back into a patient.

Wiki has a good article on various viral vectors. http: [wikipedia.org]

That's a huge revenue stream for the drug companies to just ignore because "hey, it's cured!" I just don't think the drug companies won't start looking for ways to kill this or put it out of reach of most people. They haven't exactly proven to be altruistic and wholly forthcoming thus far; they're just for-profit companies in the same old "corrupt American capitalist" system.

Every time one of your cells divides there is a small risk of a (series of) horrible mutation(s) that kills you, which would include the T-cells mentioned in TFA. However untreated leukemia is guaranteed to kill you. Choose.

Smoking takes about 50 years to give you cancer, so the answer depends on how long you have already smoked for, how long you think it will take to develop a generic cure that you can afford, and the probability you are comfortable with that they will get to the cure before the cancer gets to you (which could be never - most smokers never get cancer). Also heart disease.